Abhijit Banerjee
J-PAL Affiliated Professor
Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Member, Executive Committee
Director, J-PAL
Scientific Director, J-PAL Europe
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Harvard University, where he received his PhD in 1988. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2003 he founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) along with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan, and remains one of the directors of the lab.
Abhijit Banerjee is the recipient of the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, awarded jointly with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."
Abhijit is a past president of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a Research Associate of the NBER, a CEPR research fellow, International Research Fellow of the Kiel Institute, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. He received the Infosys Prize 2009 in Social Sciences and Economics. In 2011, he was named one of Foreign Policy magazine's top 100 global thinkers. His areas of research are development economics and economic theory. He is a member of J-PAL's Executive Committee and previously served as Co-Chair of J-PAL’s Education Sector.
Abhijit is the author of a large number of articles and five books, including Poor Economics, which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year, and Good Economics for Hard Times, both co-authored with Esther Duflo. He is the editor of three more books and has directed two documentary films. Banerjee has served on the U.N. Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. He is a trustee of Save the Children USA and the Chair of the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel and the Global Advisory Board for COVID-19 Response of the government of West Bengal.
In addition to serving as a director of J-PAL, Abhijit serves as Scientific Director of J-PAL Europe and Co-Chair of J-PAL's Innovations in Government Initiative. He has also lectured at J-PAL training events.
Note: Abhijit Banerjee does not have any social media accounts, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram. Any accounts bearing his name on those platforms are imposter accounts.